Do you remember when your grandparents made homemade wine how it looked and tasted different each time?
Tony Zafirakos had this epiphany in 2010 during a catch-up with friends in Bondi, Sydney.
“Someone put a glass in front of me and said, ‘this is natural wine,’ I tasted it and that was exactly like home wine.”
“It’s a funny story, I first started drinking, the wine from home always looked and tasted different compared to the bottle shop one. I remember it clearly, it felt almost embarrassing because our wine was coming out in these weird colours”, he tells Neos Kosmos
“Our white wine was more yellow or had an orange tinge. Now, I read articles about these ‘legendary producers’ of orange wine in northeastern Italy and Slovenia and how they were the first ones. And I remember my parents making the same in their garage,” he laughs.
“Yes, natural wine is a trend but it’s not new, it’s been around forever.”
His parents, Aristotelis and Anthoula, weren’t winemakers but one of his earliest memories growing up in Sydney was stomping on grapes with them in the backyard.
“They knew how to do that from when they were young in the village in Greece and seeing their family do it.”
In Australia, Zafirakos’ parents have been making wine this way since the early 80s.
“It’s their hobby, a thing that they started and it’s always been something that we did it as a family.”
Around 10 years ago, they started making a bit of extra for people to try, and 2016 was the first vintage they did with the intention to operate like a business.
“Then it really blew up after that for us,” Zafirakos says of the venture and remembers doing vintages in Europe every winter.
“So I could learn more. I did a vintage in Germany, Italy and spent some time in Greece too.”
His partner, Maddison Park-Neilson, joined in the craft in 2020. Since then, they have dedicated themselves to producing natural wine.
What makes this type of wine different from what is sold as organic wine?
“Organic and biodynamic speak to the farming of the grapes. But that still leaves a lot of room for adulteration in the winery. You can still use yeast from a packet, you can still filter and refine the wine, which strips out some important elements from it,” Zafirakos explains.
In fact there is no strict definition on labeling wine as ‘natural’. France is the only country where producers voluntarily enacted an official certification in 2020.
Zafirakos shares a checklist on natural winemaking, based on how they work.
It goes like this:
- “thoughtful farming as a minimum” – so it’s beyond organic farming, following regenerative and biodynamic principles
- “absolutely nothing else going into the wine” – use wild yeast for fermentation, no additives
- “we don’t use any kind of manipulation” – have no temperature control of the tanks, no artificial cooling
- “we don’t take anything away” – there is no filtering or refining. “Sometimes, the wine can be a little bit cloudy, sometimes it settles. We just kind of let it be what it wants to be.”
Andrea Contin, an importer of natural wines to Australia from Italy, Slovenia and Greece, has a similar take on what makes this wine unique, however he believes looking nice is part of the package.
“Natural wines have character, they are out of the rules and most of the times they could surprise you.
“The market is definitely growing these days, probably better then it was before when natural wines were too wild with too many ‘defects’. Defects are good in natural wines and sometimes is the beauty don’t get me wrong, I can see now winemakers are paying more attention to making natural wine as nice and clean as possible.”
Greek wines
Contin and his partner Valentina Vigni select which wines to import under the Sat Artisan Wines umbrella. In Greece, they have one active collaboration at the moment with label Ariousios from Chios.
Contin says Greek wines are “unique because of the tradition and history behind them” but explains why they opted for an island.
“We are searching wines especially from Greek islands, because I strongly believe that the breeze coming from the sea, the soil from the islands is unique and unbeatable.”
Mireia Pedrals and Spiros Batrakoulis are a wine importer couple based in Barcelona, Catalonia which they call “the mecca of the natural wine in Spain”.
Pedrals who has visited Greece’s mainland and islands extensively (and speaks Greek fluently) shares a similar view with Contin on the Greek terroir for winegrape growing.
“In our first tour, when we visited places like Thessalia, Attiki, Ioannina and Zagorohoria, we could already tell that Greece does not have one single terroir. And mountains can make all the difference,” she says comparing it to Spain’s geomorphology, where its vast central Castilla area for example is characterised by flat terrain.
“Greece is incredibly rich in terroirs. There’s many of them and quite diverse. None is better than the other, it’s just that each area with what we call its microclimate gives way to a different wine variety.”
What’s not in a name
Catalonia-born Pedrals and Larissa-born Batrakoulis met in Barcelona then moved to Mallorca in 2020, and spent much of their pandemic lockdown on the Spanish island “buying, trialling and studying different wines.”
“Bars and restaurants were closed but you could still go and buy wine from bottleshops. They were like little hubs where you could go and chat about wine. Everybody was talking about natural wine then,” Batrakoulis says and shares his first encounter with the contentious terminology.
“Some were describing it as ‘minimal intervention’ or ‘lo fi winemaking’. The opposing view was ‘there is no such thing as natural wine as all wines are natural’.”
As wine importers, he says they prefer talking with the producer and learning about how and where their wine is made rather than making a fuss about whether they label it natural or not.
“There’s not a single framework, each producer works accordingly with the conditions they face,” he says when asked about the sulphites debate.
Many people prefer natural over conventional wine because it is commonly spared the added sulfur as preservative.
Batrakoulis points out that wine marketed as totally free from sulfur can be deceiving as some natural sulphites as formed either way in the wine during fermentation.
“Everything starts from the vineyard. If you’ve got a healthy crop, you don’t need much further […] But if a producer tells me they have used a small amount of sulfur for a specific purpose, within reason I’ll listen to what they have to say.”
“The future is the past”
Connecting to tradition and the local environment of the vineyards are key principles that guided them when they birthed Satyrs wines, the couple says.
“There’s a reason why a specific variety is native to say an island in Greece, indigenous varieties tell a story, the story of the place they are born in and the conditions. This is the story of Greek wines we want to tell in Spain,” Pedrals says.
“What’s the point of bringing in [to Spain] an Assyrtiko made in mainland Greece, when it the variety is native to an island?” Batrakoulis adds.
Pending official classifications, a return to tradition seems vague but is a common denominator when talking natural wine.
“The future is the past,” Contin puts it in five words.
“Natural wines are not something new but something that used to be made a long time ago, before industrialisation, when farmers were able to work in respect of what they could find in their terroir without any magical addition to obtain the same wine every time.”
For the Zafirakos family, the latest nod to tradition within their craft was changing the name of their label in a symbolic move.
In May 2022, ‘Ari’s Natural Wine Co’ – a name that they say “started to feel less representative” of what was important to them, became ‘Aristotelis ke Anthoula’ incorporating the full Greek names of Tony’s parents.
“To honour my parents as it [winemaking] was their tradition,” Zafirakos explains.
“Ari’s was never one dude in a garage making wine.
“It has always been the culmination of my parents’ experiences of their respective upbringings in the villages in Greece they both come from, their culture, their values and their experiences bringing all those things with them to Australia and starting a family.”